Proof Of Concept: How A Charity Bridges Lab And Clinic

Great.

I'm sort of wondering, so there is this debate on, you know, when charities get involved, who should get the upside? For example, if there's a charity that's funded blockbuster treatment, who sort of gets the upside? Is it patients? Is it the company? I just...

I wondered if you could weigh in on this sort of debate.

I understand the point you're making, which is How do we ensure that the excellent work and the critical work that is done through charities in terms of developing the science and outcomes and intellectual property that ultimately then has to be taken forward by our industrial partners in order to get it to patients? Let's be clear, this isn't something that charities can do on their own.

The path to getting a drug to clinic and into patients is enormously time consuming and hugely costly.

And the ecosystem has to work in step to make that a reality.

It's hard enough just based on the attrition levels, let alone not making sure that the various components of it work very carefully together, recognizing that each should receive that fair financial return in respect to the contributions they have made to that science.

I think we are heading in the right direction on that thing.

I think there is recognition now that it is critical that we get to that point.

And I think actually there has been a huge from what used to be our bread and butter in terms of commercialization through licenses to biotech and pharma, to one in which we are far more often using ventures now to create that value, to add value.

And I think that structure of the company and the acquisitions that that presents to pharma lends itself to making sure that the value split is ultimately appropriate.

And Phil, can you talk a little bit about why this shift sort of happened where you moved away, you know, from those licensing sort of deals to, you know, now venture?

Well, I think that's driven in large part because of the huge patent cliff that pharma is facing and their need to re-energize or repopulate their portfolios.

And in reality, in order to do that in a way where the return on investment makes most sense, they are looking at assets at a later stage, preferably.

And when I say late, with clinical data is generally where currently you're likely to get more traction with pharma in terms of doing those deals.

But clearly, the merger and acquisition space is... is very active at the moment.

I imagine that will be the case for a number of years to come.

And the trouble is they have a lot of choice now.

I mean, innovation is hugely exciting and vast at the moment.

And so that's a great thing, I think, but clearly it presents choice and that is tough.

to show that they present differentiated opportunities, value-adding opportunities to pharma and biotech in order to get to those acquisition places.

the other thing to perhaps add to that is i think within the academic community there's been an increasing sort of mind shift change linked to that innovation as well to a more sort of entrepreneurial mindset as well so a lot of the researchers we work with are much keen to stay more directly involved with their projects for longer and perhaps have more say in it and more of a stake in it and so obviously to complement what our ventures team and our drug discovery team we do we do a lot of work in the entrepreneurial space as well now through our commercial partnerships team really again as phil said earlier looking to mentor people to provide sort of um small amounts of funding to help develop people and develop that that skill set that it takes to really be an entrepreneur in this space and to drive those spinner opportunities ideally in in collaboration with with our ventures fund and others so i think that's what we've seen certainly in the last few years particularly in the uk perhaps the us was was a couple of steps ahead of us in some of that but that that moved towards a lot of of our academic colleagues really wanting to be part of things that creates something can take them a lot further to ride off of their ideas.